STMA News

April 25 Proclaimed Save The Music America Day By Mayor of Johnny Cash’s Former Hometown, Hendersonville, TNWritten by Phil Sweetland - Music & Radio contributor The New York Times

NASHVILLE, TN (April 19th) – Hendersonville Mayor Scott Foster, whose current constituents include Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson and whose town used to be home to Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, has proclaimed Thursday, Apr. 25 to be “the first annual SAVE THE MUSIC AMERICA DAY,” to help songwriters and composers who “have suffered both monetary and intellectual property losses due to illegal downloading of copyrighted materials.” STMA executive director Mark Dreyer has lived and worked as a professional studio musician and producer in Hendersonville and the Nashville area since 1996, and has seen the effects first hand. “If Johnny Cash were still living,” Mayor Foster said in a telephone interview Apr. 11, “he would be awful proud of Mark Dreyer.”

STMA is a not-for-profit organization, which “provides effective ways to counteract illegal downloading of music and media through awareness campaigns designed to capture the hearts and minds of America’s music fans. “We are fighting for the hearts of our kids, which is really the next generation of music consumers” said Dreyer. “If we pay for our houses, our clothes, and our cars, then we should pay for our music,” RCA Records country star Crystal Shawanda says in a PSA for STMA.

Education of young fans is another crucial mission for STMA, and Mayor Foster told Dreyer he will contact Sumner County Schools administrators to make them and their students aware of SAVE THE MUSIC AMERICA DAY. STMA has just launched its “Take the Pledge” campaign, which will allow the foundations message to sweep through schools across America and enable our youth to rally behind a single ideal, “Support music across America by Taking the Pledge to download and share music responsibly. “This campaign,” Dreyer says, has the potential to create a counter cultural movement reshaping the hearts and minds and in our nation’s youth.”

Another advocate fighting illegal downloading is Bono, who in 2009 told USA TODAY: “How does a songwriter get paid? There’s no space for a Cole Porter in the modern age.” That same year, STMA notes, the Recording Industry of America announced that 95% of all digitally downloaded music was being acquired illegally, and that over 70,000 music jobs had been lost in the United States as a result.